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I came across the excellent Monad Challenges, a collection of exercises designed to take you through what have become some of the standard example monads and take you through the process that motivates monads as a way to handle these seemingly diverse data structures. Both the Monad Challenges and the 20 Intermediate Exercises are well worth your time. Doing them both is helping me a lot.

That said, they don't quite match up. 20IE's banana is flip bind and apple is flip ap. (This isn't unique; the also excellent Learning Haskell from first principles has as an exercise writing bind in terms of fmap and join, but the declaration it gives has the type of flip bind. The authors do point this out.) As a result, I find myself with something that there's got to be some way to simplify, of the form

foo = flip $ (flip mumble) . (flip frotz)

I'd like to think there's some sort of distributive-like law to be found and used here... watch this space.